On Wed, May 09, 2001, Jim Dixon wrote:
The very practical hard reality is that those running the Internet communicate in English. The reason for this is very simple: cost. In Europe, adding simultaneous translation into the major EU languages can easily double the cost of holding a conference.
Thats weird. WSee, the company I work for is based in Europe, and we have offices pretty much everywhere. In theory everyone is meant to have English speaking people there, but in practice we spend a lot of our time finding people to speak a common language. See, Europeans have this knack to speak more than one language. So, the dutch people here speak english and german at least. Some also speak French. Some also speak Norweigan, Finnish, Danish, Sweedish, Swiss, Italian .. I've had to get a Dutch guy to ring someone in our swiss office who he knew could also speak Italian to speak to someone in our Italian office. :-)
Nobody is insisting that the world's NOCs communicate in English. They just do, because it's practical. In most countries, there is a very high probability that anyone with a technical education has had several years of English in school. This is certainly the case in Japan, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, most of Southeast Asia, and the countries of northern Europe.
If they were doctors or pilots then sure, I can believe they've had several years in school. But these are technical people. We've all complained privately about the falling average clue level out there. Gear requires less and less clue to operate, and as internationalisation of computer equipment gets more popular you'll find that the monkey that only speaks Chinese, has setup a default install of redhat 7.0 on his servers and has configured his cisco to do BGP but fucked all the access filters is going to be a PAIN to get anything to fix. Combine this with cultural differences and you're going to be increasingly shocked as the internet becomes less US centric. Sorry guys, but we are all going to have to deal with it eventually. Now, this website. I like it. Who wants to work on generating a few templates? Adrian -- Adrian Chadd "How could we possibly use sex to get <adrian@creative.net.au> what we want? Sex _IS_ what we want!" -- Fraser